New technology revives cold cases for Fla. police

MorphoBIS allows a latent print examiner to photograph or scan a finger or palm print card taken from a crime scene

By Elizabeth JohnsonThe Herald Tribune

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — New technology is breathing life into Sarasota County cold cases. Unsolved crimes will have answers. Criminals who thought they got away will be arrested. Those are at least the expectations of a new automated fingerprint identification system that went live Wednesday at the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office.

Morpho Biometric Identification Solution replaces the agency's decade-old system with faster technology and improved algorithms that are expected to make matches that were previously impossible. This $1.2 million MorphoBIS system — the first of its kind to be activated in the world — allows a latent print examiner to photograph or scan a finger or palm print card taken from a crime scene. The examiner identifies unique points in the print, then runs a search through the system.

Within a minute, the examiner will know whether the print matches one of more than 500,000 in the sheriff's local database. If it doesn't, the examiner will run a search of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's state database. If there is still no positive match, a search of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's national database is conducted.